Worship Is Not A Competition.
This week I finally went to see the community Easter Pageant at the YMCA, as we had four people from our church in it. It was excellent! I highly recommend going (just not if it is while we are having a service ha-ha). It must have had more than 100 people performing and an equally large number of musicians and singers. I was wowed. Kathy said that it is amazing that a community as small as ours can put on such a major production. All the costumes and sets and hours upon hours of practice and rehearsals for the performers was really, really impressive.
A few years back we did a Last Supper play here at Unity Christian Church. We had a large percentage of our congregation willing to be in it and it was a lot of fun. But even with the participation we had, half of our “Apostles” were cardboard cutouts! (we did it before Iran did!) Our budget was… whatever stuff we could round up from storage rooms used in previous church plays.
But a lot of people put in a lot of time and effort to put it on and people still talk about it fondly. Just a few weeks ago Brad mentioned how much he liked being in it. But by comparison it was almost unnoticeable. Our production was tiny and so was our audience.
We aren’t, however, going by comparison. The Y’s production has a huge talent pool and a huge audience to draw from. It’s the whole county! The fact that another entity does something which is 50-fold bigger than ours was makes no difference. What matters is that both were doing something to communicate the message of the Messiah and giving the glory to God.
That is exactly the same thing with church. There are far better preachers. There are better worship teams (although you’d be hard pressed to find one at a church our size). There are nicer church buildings and better organized outreach. There are places with dazzling youth ministries and ministries to the elderly. We pale by comparison. But we aren’t going for comparison. What matters is that both they and we are worshipping God and giving Him the glory. They serve a demographic and a niche, and we serve a demographic and a niche. There are people who wouldn’t ever come here for a Sunday. The same is true for the big churches. They aren’t our competition. If they are teaching the gospel truthfully then they are our partners in reaching as many of the lost as can be, through different means.